


Tsarbucks

by sashabeef



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Black Volvo Heretics, F/M, Multi, Nikolattes, Parody, Ridiculous Coffee Shop AU, coffee shop AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 05:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1970994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashabeef/pseuds/sashabeef
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark shadow is cast over the residents of Ravka’s local Tsarbucks. </p><p>"There are two scones at this table, you could have brunch with me anytime you like."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tsarbucks

**Author's Note:**

> Leah: I'm sorry.
> 
> Dani: I’m not sorry at all. Well, maybe just a little bit.

Birds were chirping. The sun was shining. ‘ _Royals_ _’_  was bumping vaguely in the distance. _Again,_  Alina thought in despair as the lyrics drilled into her brain.  _Seriously?_  She was beginning to hate the song with a passion.  
  
Beside her, Mal had his hands jammed into his pockets, absently humming something about tigers on gold leashes as he walked with her to work.  
  
“Not you, too,” Alina groaned. Mal turned to look at her, a small smile tugging at the edges of his lips.  
  
“Let me guess, too upbeat? Not enough bitterness? If you want, I can add lines from The Cure after it. Tigers on a gold leash—love is dead. I have no money. Everything’s sad,” he playfully nudged her in the side.  
  
“We don’t have any money,” Alina defended. “And love is  _at least_  in the last stages of cancer. Your last relationship made you into a walking tumor.”  
  
“You’re grim in the morning. And I thought we agreed we were going to stop calling Ruby that.”  
  
“Verbal agreements are worth nothing these days,” she nodded, looking quite solemn. “And I haven’t had any coffee yet. I can’t get to work quick enough.”  
  
Mal rubbed his chin thoughtfully, “Speaking of things that are hot and bitter, how’s Zoya?”  
  
She stopped walking long enough to give him a vaguely horrified look. “Really, Mal?” To which he shrugged, looking entirely too innocent while not being innocent at all.  
  
The song’s chorus grew closer. Alina could almost hear the echo of ‘ _Royaaaals_ _’_  in her head and she wanted very much to just get to work, where she would only have to endure Nikolai’s beatboxing. That, at least, was not equipped with a super bass.  _Yet_ , she added with a mental cringe.  
  
“You did tell me she wanted my number. Can you blame a guy for asking?” He asked, and she had opened her mouth to respond when the music was suddenly that much closer. So close, in fact, that it was practically on top of her—  
  
No, really. It was on top of her. Alina barely had time to register the sound of a crisp horn honk, the feel of Mal’s arms around her, and the sensation of being pulled back from a certain, imminent death as a black Volvo went speeding past, spraying dirty city water onto the curb.  
  
“What the hell—” Muttered Mal.  
  
“Asshole!” Alina screamed, eyeing the license plate and quickly trying to memorize it for divine, or at the very least, impolite, retribution:  
  
DRKING  
  
Doctor King? Dork King? Dorking? What was that even supposed to  _mean_?  
  
“Who the hell drives like that?!” Alina hissed, staring at her shoes—her  **brand new** , hard earned work shoes that she had put on for the first time that morning—that were now sprayed with dirty water.  
  
“Maniacs?” Mal offered, staring off after the car with a stern look on his face. Alina scowled, arms falling flat to her sides from where they had been in the air as she yelled after the car.  
  
“Not helping, Mal,” she grumbled. He rubbed her back soothingly, smiling again though he did look concerned. “Couldn’t you of run after it? All that ROTC has to be useful for  _something_.”  
  
“And do what? Kick the rims and get charged a million Evil Monopoly dollars?” Alina shook her head, but frowned when she noticed that Mal’s stern look had returned, “What’s wrong?”  
  
He tilted his head, “How long has it been? Seventeen…”  
  
“Seventeen what?”  
  
Mal blinked, as if clearing his thoughts from a dazzling fog, “Hundred hours. I have to get going back to the Junior Officer’s meeting.”  
  
“Right,” she said, peering at him suspiciously. “Have to work hard to earn those Evil Monopoly dollars.”  
  
“Someone needs to make sure you can post bail after you’ve hunted down the Volvo Maniac,” he said, giving a grin and ruffling the top of her head. Apparently it had gone unnoticed to him that she had curled her hair today.  
  
She batted his hand away with a huff, but couldn’t resist laughing as she pushed him the other direction. “Just go. I’ll only give them a stern talking to, I promise. No crime necessary.”  
  
“Are you sure? I saw what he did to your shoes.”  
  
“Don’t worry,” she insisted. “Karma has a way of hitting people.”  
  
 _So does my fist_ , she thought, before dryly amending,  _and apparently Volvos_. Just wait until she found that car again. They had no idea who they’d almost run over.  
  
Mal laughed before going down the opposite sidewalk, which lead to the university and the ROTC meeting, “Don’t worry, Alina. I’m sure we’ll never see that car again.”  
  
“For their sake, I hope so!” she called back, before waving goodbye. “Later, Mal. Don’t die on me from boredom.”  
  
“I’ll do my best. Send Zoya my phone number!”  
  
 _Stupid Mal. Stupid Zoya. Stupid Zoya and Stupid Mal and his stupid phone number._ Which, Alina realized with an internal groan, was one they shared due to being broke and having only a landline in their apartment. Great. Being a go-between for her childhood friend’s booty calls was not her ideal living arrangement. She was still recovering from the one late-night voice message Ruby left involving handcuffs and vodka.  
  
 _Never drinking vodka again_ , she thought with a shudder. Not like she’d particularly enjoyed it before, anyway, but the sentiment stayed the same.  
  
Alina shook her head, removing such scarring thoughts from her brain as she shouldered her bag. Her eyes drifted to the front of the coffee house where she worked, TSARBUCKS shining with bright, golden letters. A frown formed on her lips when she saw the small sign in the front window:  
  
 **Try our new Nikolattes! They’re just as delicious as the namesake! Get them while they’re hot (which is always)!**  
  
 _… Saints damned it, Nikolai._  She stared at the picture of him on the sign, that typical princely smile gracing his features as he tried to seduce the camera. Two of his shirt buttons were undone. Who was he trying to impress? She wondered, before snorting. Everyone, of course. The man sold coffee as if he was selling sex, and it never came cheap.  
  
 _And hopefully not foamy_ , Alina thought with a snicker at her manager’s expense. Shaking her head and trying to remove the mental image, Alina pushed open the door. A bell rung, and just like that her day began.  
  
.

.

.  
  
Tsarbucks was… well, it was definitely a reflection of its management. It was an upscale coffee house, with a color scheme of pale blue and gold. Plush sofas and divans lined the walls, and there was a mixture of mahogany coffee tables and marble countertops. A pastry case full of delicacies framed the barista work station, with low, golden lighting casting an ethereal glow on the confections.  
  
Most obnoxious, she herself thought, had to be the chandeliers Nikolai insisted added to the ambiance. She herself thought it was a tragedy waiting to happen (and a waste of money), but it wasn’t her store, so she never voiced her opinion on the matter. She squinted in the store’s lighting as she approached her station, taking off her jacket and pulling her hair back into a bun.  
  
It was the afternoon shift, so the coffee house wasn’t as busy as it was with the morning rush. Only two other occupants were currently visible: Mikhael, the other barista on duty, was leaning over the counter and playing what appeared to be Angry Birds on his iPhone. A few tables down, Alina saw Alexei, a regular and also a classmate of hers, drawing something on his tablet, a Macbook Air farther in front of him, and a large coffee dangerously near his elbow.  
  
“Sticks,” Mikhael greeted cheerily enough, but Alina’s nose wrinkled at the nickname.  
  
“Hi to you, too,” she replied blandly. “Still stuck on the same level? You have that constipated air to you today. It reeks of butt-kicking. You’re the butt being kicked.”  
  
He frowned, and if Alina had realized the level of Angry Birds was such a delicate subject for the big, redheaded man, she would have… hesitated a little longer before making fun of him, “Looks like it’s personal now.”  
  
Alina shook her head before turning to Alexei, who was still hunched over his MacBook, scribbling intently at whatever it was he was working on.  
  
“Alexei,” she called, noting the precarious position of his drink. “You know your elbow’s next to your coffee, right? It’ll spill on your laptop if you aren’t careful.” The other student was in the same boat as her when it came to finances. Being in college was rough, and she couldn’t fathom how much it would suck to lose her own computer due to some stray hot liquids.  
  
He grunted, not looking up from his tablet, “Have you finished any of our geography project yet?”  
  
She winced as she started to tie on her barista’s apron—dark blue, with golden embroidery on the ties, “What do you consider ‘any’?”  
  
Alexei sighed, looking up, “Buy me a muffin and I’ll stay longer to work on it.”  
  
Mikhael rose an eyebrow, looking between the two of them, before shrugging and returning to his furious fowl.  
  
Alina smiled, “Blueberry, right?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Deal. Now or later?” she asked, already heading towards the ovens where—surely enough—semi-fresh baked goods were waiting for her to pick up. His answer was expected.  
  
“Now’s good. Butter it?”  
  
Mikhael began to snicker loudly, causing Alexei to blink before he turned bright red.  
  
“You know what I mean, you oaf,” The student hissed. Mikhael only laughed louder.  
  
“Of course, ‘lexei,” he chortled. “Don’t forget to butter his muffin, Sticks!”  
  
Alina rolled her eyes, “So hilarious. Maybe you should open up a comedy act in Fjerda, you’d make a killing.”  
  
An ominous silence fell over the coffee house. Before Mikhael waved his hand, “Nah. Who goes to Fjerda for a good time?”  
  
“Assholes,” Alina announced. She found herself thinking back on the car that had nearly ran her over earlier, and felt irritation bubble in her. “Speaking of which. Some jerk in a fancy black Volvo nearly ran me over today. Can you believe it?”  
  
“Yeah, you’re hard to see.”  
  
Her motions were jerky as she yanked the muffin tray out of the container, practically dropping it on the counter as she turned to scowl at him.  
  
“Har, har. I could of died! Who drives so crazily? I’ll tell you who. Rich jerks with black volvos. Heretics. Black Volvo Heretics.”  
  
Alexei frowned from behind the protective screen of his laptop, “At least you won’t run into them again.”  
  
The bell on the door rang.  
  
Alina turned back to the muffin tray, manhandling the blueberry muffin onto a plate. Alexei winced at her fingers touching the actual food, but wisely kept silent in the face of her rage, “I guess.”  
  
Mikhael snorted, too absorbed in his game to realize that the door was opening wider. Alina had only just grabbed the knife to begin lathering the muffin with butter when a breeze threw the doors to Tsarbucks wide open.  
  
What happened next happened slowly, but somehow all at once:  
  
The breeze blew back the dark fabric of a man’s coat wide, casting his jacket out like shadow trailing behind him.  
  
The breeze then traveled, slinking like a panther in the night as it found its target: a sole cup of plain black coffee, perilously close to a near irreplaceable laptop.  
  
The coffee tilted from the breeze, simultaneously as Alexei reached up to grab the muffin from Alina.  
  
The coffee fell over, plunging the keys of the laptop into eternal darkness.  
  
The man walked from the door to the counter.  
  
“I have come for the offer in the window,” said a man’s calm voice.  
  
Alina looked up and met quartz grey eyes.  
  
Alexei screamed.


End file.
